DETROIT — They say humans have inhabited this area for about 11,000 years, but it wasn’t until Sunday that any of them — from the tailgates of Eastern Market to the bars of Corktown — could stare into a fresh NFL season and utter, with both a straight face and reasonable confidence, the following words:
Super. Bowl.
The Detroit Lions have famously never even been to it, let alone ever won it. More than that though, never before has there been a legitimate belief that such a thing was even within reason. Prior to last January, the Lions had won just a single playoff game of any kind during the Super Bowl era. It came in the 1991 season.
By last winter, Aidan Hutchinson, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Penei Sewell, Sam LaPorta, David Montgomery, Jared Goff, Frank Ragnow and a whole host of others had moved into Ford Field here.
Detroit rattled off two epic, euphoric home playoff victories and then led by 17 in the second half of the NFC championship game before succumbing to the San Francisco 49ers.
Last year’s team was shot out of a cannon though, a work in progress, especially on defense. So general manager Brad Holmes filled holes there and re-signed star players on both sides of the ball. Both coordinators decided to stay on head coach Dan Campbell’s staff. Young players matured.
The hype and anticipation grew to the point that chants of “Jar-ed Goff” were liable to break out at baseball games and wedding receptions alike.
And so the longest suffering fans in the NFL gathered on this gloriously sunny September day embracing what for so long was a dangerous and eventually damning emotion for them, something generations of elders warned their children against.
Hope.
Three-plus thunderous hours later here and that hope train is still full throttle.
The Lions beat the Los Angeles Rams 26-20 in overtime, erasing a fourth-quarter deficit to once again beat their former franchise quarterback, Matthew Stafford, whose season ended here in the playoffs last January.
It gave fans a look at the most deep and talented team they’ve had in memory, but also a taste of what so many expect to be a season of thrilling victories leading, eventually, to a Lombardi Trophy; or at least again something damn close.
It’s a long way to the Super Bowl in New Orleans — games and injuries and luck and so on. It’s hard to make the big game, unless you’re Patrick Mahomes. But for once Detroit can see it, can feel it, can even hear it in the ear-piercing screams of this stadium-turned-football thunderdome.
When big plays needed to be made, Detroit made them. On offense. On defense. By this guy and that.
“We’re hard to break,” Campbell said. “We did what we had to do.”
The offense is better than ever, mostly thanks to third-year burner Jameson Williams becoming what appears to be a reliable weapon — five receptions for 121 yards and a touchdown. He also rushed for 13 yards.
Yet everything still begins with the blunt force of the offensive line, including the game-winning overtime drive won by running the ball on seven of eight plays, mostly via Montgomery’s determination.
“Battering ram,” Goff called him.
The defense, though, is suddenly legit — three layers of nastiness and violence and, in Campbell’s parlance, “grit.”
They knocked down, picked off and sent waves of rushers at Stafford, whose brilliance could handle it, but plenty of other quarterbacks won’t. They stuffed fourth-down attempts. They forced field goals. They drew penalties. They got off the field on a potential game-clinching late fourth quarter Rams possession. They made the Rams earn every blade of field turf.
It was nowhere more obvious than the defensive end combo of Hutchinson, the No. 2 pick of the 2022 NFL Draft, and Marcus Davenport, a 6-foot-6, 285-pound mountain they signed as a free agent. Each tended to fold one side of the Rams’ offensive line right into Stafford.
“Crunch the can,” Campbell said. “Crush the can.”
This is a team in full, an obvious contender, a roster built to win and win now.
“We’ve got star players, we’ve got ballplayers,” Williams said.
Yet they’ve got an attitude also, such as receiver St. Brown throwing determined blocks on the overtime drive despite playing a game where he managed only three receptions.
“Saint is a special, special specimen,” said Montgomery, who finished with 91 rushing yards and the game-winning touchdown. “His mentality is so contagious.”
To say the way the Lions play offers an extra connection with the fans is an understatement. They’ll take wins anyway they can get it, yet this is a city that has been beaten down economically through the years, mocked and stereotyped, and often saw the Lions provide only extra embarrassment.
And so opening day arrived with not just construction cranes and new condos all over downtown, but with a fresh excitement over what might come.
A city of underdogs embracing the very considerable power of finally knowing a favorite, or expecting success, of backing a bully. Of feeling, at last, it is OK to dream.
It was the start of something potentially special, something potentially super.
